The Aggressive Suppression of Spiritual Awakening

Please note, this is a true story of my experience but due to the emotional charge induced by poor psychiatric care I am unable to write it through a first-person narrative. I have used my grandparents’ names as it brings me comfort to know they look out for me from the spiritual dimensions beyond the earthly realm.

She was acting delusional, offering her husband bits of salad in the front seat of the car like a dog. When he wouldn’t take any she erupted with anger, chucking a soccer ball out the window of the moving vehicle. The couple had up and left their latest home and were living on the road. They had nowhere to go at the moment so Don just kept driving. It helped him think anyway. He’d never seen Elizabeth behave like this before and was gravely concerned.

Elizabeth couldn’t talk. She’d somehow felt herself go mute and was trying to communicate what she was seeing of the world through actions. She didn’t even know what she wanted to say but something bubbled inside of her begging to be heard. She lifted her fist, slamming it on the dashboard in frustration. The release tentatively calmed her down. All she could do was try to communicate whatever was burning inside of her through the tangible objects around her. It made every bit of sense to her symbolically rich universe but Don couldn’t make out the words stuck beneath her tongue. Not sure what else to do, Don called her mother. She listened to the situation and encouraged him to take Elizabeth to the hospital.

Elizabeth was met by the doctors quite quickly at the emergency department. They took her behind the registration desk immediately for blood sampling. She was agitated. Memories of her early childhood ringing through her unconscious mind made her squirm in the bed. Don knew art was an outlet so he asked for a pencil and paper for her to draw. This kept her quiet and focused for a short bit. Then the drawing surfaced the memory of her dead brother so she changed gears and fixated on sorting recycling down to the tiniest bits of paper that she could.

Elizabeth didn’t know why she was doing it but a compulsion took over. She peeled the tin off the applesauce package and set it aside. She devoured its contents and then placed the juice box straw in the leftover container. On and on she went finding, sorting, fine-tuning her organization of any recycling she could get her hands on within a short distance of the bed. Elizabeth was being pulled into deep grief. She’d moved past her brother and was falling into a sense of anguish she could never return from. She’d developed a macroscopic perspective of the Earth’s ecological state in her university career. Rather than allowing Elizabeth the time and space to process the ecological grief she’d spiraled into, the doctors took her for an MRI. She saw the room fade as the sedative kicked in and suddenly ended in blackness.

Elizabeth woke up in the psychiatric ward. She was in a room with white walls and a steel toilet mounted to the wall. Her hospital gown had loosened overnight. She sat up on a plastic foam mat. Elizabeth screamed for help. She noticed a camera in the corner and relaxed slightly; someone would see her and come get her soon. She stripped off her gown and started breathing her soul back to her body.

Hours passed and Elizabeth grew weary that someone would let her out of this blank room. No food or water, no toilet paper. So she breathed through another state of consciousness, exhausting her efforts to escape the prison she found herself in. Eventually, a nurse came to the thick metal door and slid open a window so she could see them. “We are going to come in now, Elizabeth,” they said. “Please sit on the mattress with your legs crossed.”

Scared, Elizabeth did as she was told. She knew she was in the hospital but something had gone off in her. She had had a spiritual awakening and these people were treating a pathology. They forced her to take medication. At first she didn’t resist but as they handed her hospital pajamas, much similar to the orange prison suits you see on TV but a hospital green instead, she suddenly understood how little these people could help.

Elizabeth walked out of the room following the nurse down the hall. They showed her to a room empty of anything that indicated warmth. A hospital bed awaited her while her belongings remained locked up behind the nurse’s station. Elizabeth would spend the next six weeks here.

She didn’t stay long with nothing to do. Instead she walked out into the hallway to get a grip on this foreign environment. The halls were filled with people walking around like zombies. Eyes distant from being overmedicated, bodies slow and lethargic under the “medicine.” Elizabeth saw these people. She saw their deepest struggles and she also saw what brought each one alive. She made mental notes as she moved through the halls looking for something to do.

Three weeks went by where Elizabeth didn’t get to see the sun. It maddened her to have a beautiful patio of rose bushes on the other side of a locked door, part of the ward but kept away from the patients. “Every single one of these people need sunshine,” she thought. Instead of anger Elizabeth fell into an ecstatic state and started dancing. She carried her light through the ward lifting up each of the other warriors one by one. She talked with them and helped reignite their spark. Elizabeth got the depressed pianist back on the piano and the tai chi practitioner back into practice. She got the young spiritual seeker into crystals and yoga. Elizabeth was working her magic.

Her mother came in one day and noticed the sun as her daughter lit up the room. She was fuming to discover the institution’s patio locked and put her activist energy to use to have the doors opened. This freed up Elizabeth’s workload, giving her space to ground. She spent time drawing and writing about the roses and the birds outside instead of playing the role of the mad therapist. Her mother noticed instant improvements and pushed to be able to take her out into the forest nearby.

While Elizabeth was doing better, she was still in an altered state of consciousness. From her perspective, her mom had come to rescue her from the hospital and take her home to somewhere she could heal. Alas, her mother had a differing perspective of Elizabeth’s spiritual awakening. She faked a heart attack, manipulating Elizabeth to go back inside. In those moments Elizabeth registered that her mom was acting but chose love over her personal body and rights just to make sure she was in fact okay.

As her mother walked up to the check-in desk, Elizabeth saw a security guard behind the counter. She registered immediately where she was going. Without a fight Elizabeth walked up the stairs where two more security guards followed. She collapsed as she reached the psych ward door. Her mind, body, and spirit were tired from enduring this lifeless place and she just couldn’t quite walk herself freely in there. Her mom sat next to her. With a gentleness Elizabeth had never even known her mother capable of, she listened to her daughter cry. Once the tears settled she shared the ultimatum that presented itself: either Elizabeth walked in or the security guards would carry her there.

Elizabeth chose to take the last few steps through the door herself. When she arrived there was a whole team of nurses and more security guards. She registered the threat before her — they were going to inject her with another shot of a mind-altering substance that would cause the same blackout as earlier. Elizabeth sat on the ground in silent protest, trying not to pose any sort of threat in hopes that she could go back to her room for the night.

No one came to talk to her. They simply surrounded her, mimicking a gang rape she’d endured earlier in her life. Elizabeth’s alarm bells went off. She started trying to dance her way out from under their grasp but they closed her in, ushering her towards the isolation door. Not once had she shown signs of threatening medication refusal or aggression. She sat silently on the floor until they closed in on her then did everything in her power to escape without harming another.

They managed to usher her into isolation. Immediately, hands flew to touch her body. They pinned her down on her stomach with one person holding back each limb individually. The aggressors tore off her clothing. With no ability to move Elizabeth screamed at the top of her lungs. If she was going down, someone was going to know about the injustice, she thought. They injected something into both sides of her buttocks. She watched her consciousness leave her body as she was in complete terror. Elizabeth came to know the dark energies that infiltrate this earth. Her spirit forever wounded from the battle.

Elizabeth spent the next 24 hours locked in the bare cold room eating sandwiches off the floor. She woke up angrier than she’d ever been in her life but scared to embody the power behind this emotion. This was not how you treat psychiatric illness; Elizabeth saw a fractured system that hit her earlier grief. It sent her into complete rebellion.

Elizabeth started to see a very harsh reality after that, one that was difficult to hold alone. Nearly a decade later, she still struggles to know what happens behind locked doors of psychiatric facilities. Her situation was just one of many abuses and negligence taking place. She will never forget the grandmother that dressed her when they took her things away, bur she will also never forget the old lady’s battle cry when she went down fighting for truth just as Elizabeth had in the isolation unit that day.